What's With the Pictures blocked by Photobucket

[porwolf]

What is that about? More and more pictures on the Pelican Forum cannot be seen anymore. Instead I get this:



Very annoying!! Seems like you ave to pay Photobucket to view the posted pictures.

Pelican should ban Photobucket picture links.

[steely]

Yes - it is annoying but is their business model practice. Like a subscription but forced like a ransom.

In a recent thread (a couple weeks? back) , we were thanking Wayne & Co for letting us post here for free.

[GH85Carrera]

Evidently they decided to start charging for any link to another web site. So people that have zillions of photos posted in a thread, just have that square you posted. They have to pay a big price to get the links to work.

Photobucket decided that is how they can make money. A lot of customers refuse to pay and are former customers.

[porschenut]

What's really annoying is that now there are archived threads and older threads I've subscribed to for reference purposes that are now missing a lot of pictures and most of them probably aren't going to come back. That is a HUGE loss to everyone.

I agree that 3rd party hosting should be verboten on Pelican! Laptops and cell phones have huge storage capacity so there should be no need to store pictures only on hosting sites.

[GWN7]

And you can no longer retrieve your own pictures from Photobucket. If you have photos hosted there you can no longer copy them onto your own hard drive. They basically own your pictures once you post them on their site.

[MBAtarga]

I fortunately had originals of about 95% of the files I put on Photobucket so when they held my account pictures for the $400 ransom I just went in and deleted them.

[sammyg2]

I am not familiar with this boto****et you speak of.

[Sarc]

The AOL of photo hosting. Can't for the life of me understand why in 2017 people are still using the bucket when there are SO many better options out there.

[Brando]

Good alternatives:

https://imgur.com/
https://gfycat.com/

And more that are FREE with no 3rd party hosting penalty.

[GH85Carrera]

Originally Posted by Brando

Good alternatives:

https://imgur.com/
https://gfycat.com/

And more that are FREE with no 3rd party hosting penalty.

For how long? Will they also figure out they can charge $400 for the privilege of using them?

[SeanPizzle]

Can you host them on Google and put links to them? I am a little late on the uptake of this. I rarely used PB but I did post pictures there on other forum threads. I think I have some family pics there and it will really piss me off if I can't download them.

[Jims5543]

I was able to download all my pics off of Photobucket, 90% of them I had backed up already.

Then I deleted all my pictures and send a very nice FU email to them while deleting my account.


If they had decided on a competitive price I would have subscribed. They decided to perform an act of extortion.

Adios photobucket, it was a nice 12 year run!

The godsmack is I used to host my own photos / videos on my own website. With the occurrence of Youtube and Photobucket I figured I would just use them. I never anticipated this move from them.

[john70t]

Originally Posted by porwolf

Pelican should ban Photobucket picture links.

I don't like it either but:
1). Photobucket hosts and distributes the pics for free as advertised, and people have a choich to use another hosting site, or set up file sharing at home if they want, and there are a ton of other free hosting companies to choose from afaik.

2). Computers and ISPs costs money. I've read it's only like 1/10th of a penny actual cost to send 10GB of data for the ISP's, probably electricity, but I don't know. But Photobucket needs to cover their costs and make profit for demanding investors. That last part is where business sometimes goes squirrely.

3). If a 3rd party website doesn't host some of the traffic content, then PelicanPartsdotcom would have to store it all.
Storing/sorting/distributing twenty years of archived daily data does not equal profit and easy money for PP.
Wayne doesn't have to host anything other than a tech section tightly moderated/monitored.
Everything else is our personal sandbox.

[JavaBrewer]

Humm...



Does anyone see my Jeep above? I do from my browser. I have a free account and used the direct HTML link.

[id10t]

For $5/mo you can get a linode - 20gb disk space (need 4 or so for an OS) and 1tb of data transfer per month.

For any Pelican member, I'll give you a domain name (yourname.myfqdn.org) and configure a webserver, upload for you, give you directions on uploading, etc. just ask me for my linode referral code and use it when you sign up (I get $20 credit when you use it for 3 months... and I can give you a discount code for $10 credit...) This takes me about 15 minutes to do

For a small fee I'll set it up as a subdomain, configure a mail server so you can create address at-will and send/receive email, set up automatic forwards, etc. Again, with directions and any other help needed. This takes me 4 hours or so to do.

Just shoot me a PM.


For even lower cost, you can get a 1and1 hosting account. Register a domain of choice on http://domains.google for $12/mo - 1and1 is like $1/mo for a low traffic site.

[cairns]

The Martin Shkreli of photo hosting.

Hopefully they'll be looking at twenty years too....

[porwolf]

I understand for Photobucket it's all about maximizing ROI. I am puzzled though that our host allows those blocked links on Pelican forums when Pelican demands to post pictures at least in the Parts Wanted and For Sale forum. But all forums lose with these blocked Photobucket links instead of pictures that can be seen by everybody here.